Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey were among the tech moguls who decried the “horrific” murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee, who was fatally stabbed on Tuesday night in San Francisco.
Lee, a 43-year-old father of two and chief product officer at fintech firm MobileCoin, was reportedly killed in San Francisco’s downtown Rincon Hill neighborhood at approximately 2:35 a.m. local time on Tuesday.
Police have yet to identify a suspect or announce an arrest.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk slammed what he described as an ongoing spree of “violent crime” in San Francisco.
“Many people I know have been severely assaulted,” Musk tweeted. “Violent crime in SF is horrific and even if attackers are caught, they are often released immediately.”
Musk reacted to a post from by former MMA fighter Jake Shields, who described Lee as a “good friend” and said he “appeared to have been targeted in a random mugging/attack.”
Musk also asked San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins if the city was “taking stronger action to incarcerate repeat offenders.”
Lee, who went by the Twitter handle @CrazyBob, last posted on the site on April 2, when he retweeted a video of a SpaceX launch on that day.
Jack Dorsey, whose company Block owns Cash App, confirmed Lee’s passing in a post on the decentralized social media platform Nostr. Lee was the first chief technology officer at Square, the company that was later renamed Block.
“It’s real. Getting calls. Heartbreaking,” Dorsey said. “Bob was instrumental to Square and Cash App. STL guy.”
Other tech leaders posted their condolences for Lee’s passing on social media, with some noting he was the father of two young girls.
MobileCoin CEO Joshua Goldbard described Lee as a “force of nature” in a heartfelt statement on his passing.
“He helped to birth Android and CashApp into our world. Moby was his dream: a privacy protecting wallet for the 21st century. I will miss him every day.”
Police said a 43-year-old male with “apparent stab wounds” was rushed to a local hospital before succumbing to his injuries. Local media later identified the man as Lee.
Few details have emerged on the circumstances of the attack.
The Post has reached out to officials at Cash App and Block for comment.
“I just got devastating news that our friend Bob Lee was killed in SF early today,” said Abra Global CEO Bill Barhydt. “Bob was a dad, the former CTO of Square where he created Cash App & CTO of Mobile Coin. He was a generous decent human being who didn’t deserve to be killed.”
“So sad to hear of @crazybob’s untimely passing,” Figma CEO Dylan Field tweeted. “I first met him in summer 2006 — he didn’t care that I was only 14 and we talked tech / geeked out about programming. We remained connected over the years and he was an early supporter of Figma.”
“It’s so hard to believe he is gone,” Field added.
The San Francisco Standard, a local news outlet, described Lee as “a longtime member of the Bay Area software development community who had recently moved to Miami.”
Lee had decided to stay in San Francisco for an extra day while visiting the city on a business trip, a friend of the slain executive told the outlet.
“I’m still in shock,” the friend said. “No way he did anything to provoke this and I feel like he would just hand his money and watch to a mugger.”
Lee is a former Google engineer who was part of the team that helped launch the widely-used Android operating system, according to his bio on MobileCoin’s website.
Lee’s LinkedIn profile described him as a “startup advisor and angel investor” who had invested in a host of well-known firms, including SpaceX, Clubhouse and Figma.
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